[ANPPOM-Lista] naxos no wall street journal

[Carlos Palombini]

Bounty on a Budget August 26, 2013, 6:28 p.m. ET

Until 1987, classical-music lovers knew Naxos from a Haydn cantata and an
opera by Richard Strauss as the island where Theseus ditched Ariadne after
she saved him from the Minotaur. Today, Naxos stands for a gigantic new
force in classical recordings, uniquely in tune with the markets,
technology and listening habits of our time. What's in a name? The
German-born, Hong Kong-based maverick Klaus Heymann picked it more or less
out of a hat. ("Universal" was already taken.)

Mr. Heymann's empire stands on three pillars. First: a budget-CD label—once
belittled, now showered with prizes. Second: a distribution network—founded
because existing distributors refused to do business with Naxos, now the
go-to conduit for classical-indie-CD labels and producers of opera DVDs
galore. And third: what bills itself as the world's first subscription
streaming service, running to 85,000 CDs on some 250 labels, 1¼ million
tracks in all, the lot available on demand for about 85 cents a day. Some
800 CDs' worth of music is added monthly.

"The Naxos Music Library is my favorite baby," says Mr. Heymann, who is 76
the way other people are 42. "It's really my brainchild. When we launched
in 2002, the staff thought this time I'd really gone mad." At the time, the
industry was buzzing about downloads. Mr. Heymann reckoned that what
customers wanted, ultimately, was not ownership of tracks but access.

"And it was true," he said recently, speaking over Skype from historic
Franklin, Tenn., home of Naxos of America, some 25 miles outside of
Nashville. "Today more than 60% of music is consumed on mobile devices. I
read a sci-fi novel years ago in which you could get your music from a
socket in the wall. Now you don't even need the socket."

He guesses that he has listened to about 25% of the currently available
120,000 hours. "That's more than a lifetime," he notes. Closer to 14 solid
years, in point of arithmetical fact, but perhaps I quibble. Figuring six
hours of listening per day, we're talking 85 years, cradle to grave.

To his chagrin, Mr. Heymann never learned to read music. He plays no
instrument. Call him a musical illiterate if you must but never an
ignoramus. "My goal," he has said, "is to record every piece of classical
music ever written at least once." In the Age of Klaus, the cosmos of
recorded classics has become an exponentially more diversified place, with
landmark series dedicated to American Classics as well as Western-style
symphonic composers of Japan and China, with Arab Classics in the pipeline.

Published last year, "The Story of Naxos" (Piatkus), by the company insider
Nicolas Soames, captures Mr. Heymann's empire-building in swift, crisp
prose. It's all there. The suitcases stuffed with dollars. The lawsuits.
The prophetic gambles. The projects only a madman would take on.

"I have a stupid habit of opening my mouth sometimes, and then I'm forced
to do things," Mr. Heymann explains.

Naxos took wing as a vehicle for generic digital CDs of the 30 top-selling
classical titles marketed to mass outlets like department stores. Today the
label claims all classical music as its province, still at cut-rate prices.
The deliberate, no-frills image persists. So does the fixed, pinch-penny,
one-size-fits-all fee structure, in keeping with wafer-thin margins.
Royalties to performers? None. But Mr. Heymann is loyal to his artists and
demands loyalty in return.

At first, Naxos made rain with unknowns. Hired as workhorses, some emerged
as the Naxos rock stars, building immense discographies block by monumental
block, yet never promoted for their own sake. Take Jenő Jandó, a music
professor in Budapest, represented on Naxos—just for starters—by Bach's
"Goldberg Variations," the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas, the two Brahms piano
concertos, and the complete piano music of Bartók.

And then there's Mrs. Heymann, a violinist known professionally as Takako
Nishizaki. The original pupil of Shinichi Suzuki, founder of the Suzuki
Method, and later the runner-up to Itzhak Perlman in the illustrious
Leventritt Competition, she acted from the start as Mr. Heymann's kitchen
cabinet of one, recommending musicians, vetting master tapes. As an artist
in her own right, she has contributed more than 100 recordings to the Naxos
catalog, including the core repertory of Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart;
rarities by neglected masters (Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges;
Johann Baptist Vaňhal); and cash cows like Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" (a
record million and a half units sold) and Chen and He's "Butterfly Lovers
Violin Concerto" (can 1.3 billion Chinese be wrong?).

True, remnants of the unsustainable, free-spending major labels of
yesteryear survive to serve an elite of old-fashioned superstars. The canny
mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli has been scoring bull's-eye after surprise
bull's-eye for Decca as long as Naxos has existed. But artists at this
level write their own rules.

"We wouldn't pay her kind of fees," Mr. Heymann says. "We wouldn't give the
'total artistic control' she requires over repertoire, cover design, image.
But times are changing for us, too. In the past, it didn't matter whether
our recording artists also had thriving concert careers. Today, unless they
have concert careers, we can't sell their CDs. In the U.S., if artists
actively tour, we sell more units at concerts than in shops, including
Amazon.com."

Increasingly, busy artists who don't quite rank with Joshua Bell, Gustavo
Dudamel, Yo-Yo Ma, Anna Netrebko or the Vienna Philharmonic cast their lot
with Naxos, developing large-scale legacy projects, even if it means
digging into their own pockets (or those of patrons) to do so.

"If we had to pay full costs for our sessions, we couldn't justify the
orchestral recordings at all," Mr. Heymann says. "Once we could sell 30,000
to 50,000 copies of a CD. Now it's down to 6,000. But when the Nashville
Symphony wins five Grammys for Naxos recordings, that's a big deal for
them. The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra is subsidizing Marin Alsop's
Prokofiev cycle. Artists who want to tour and have a presence online need
to invest in image."

What kind of an offer might induce Mr. Heymann to cash out? "First of all,
I wouldn't sell," Mr. Heymann said. "I wouldn't want to see my life's work
subjected to the instability we're seeing in the business today. EMI
Classics has changed hands four times over the last few years. The future
of the Sony music business and Universal is in doubt because of shareholder
pressures. As to value, we have the Naxos catalog. We have the Naxos Music
Library, as well as parallel video and spoken-word platforms, which are not
making a lot of money but are fully paid and profitable, unlike most online
platforms, which are hemorrhaging. Building our distribution network cost
me a fortune. And we have lots of intellectual property—liner notes,
composer portraits, things like that. About $100 million would be fair. But
it's no more than I've invested."

*Mr. Gurewitsch is a writer on Maui. *

A version of this article appeared August 27, 2013, on page D5 in the U.S.
edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Bounty on a Budget.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323665504579029130395427144.html

-- 
carlos palombini
professor de musicologia ufmg
ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini
proibidao.org
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